An Egyptian Christian suspected of trying to convert Muslims in Libya was tortured to death while in police custody, an Egyptian human rights lawyer said.

Ezzat Hakim Attallah "died after being tortured with other
detainees" in Libya’s second largest city Benghazi, Naguib
Guebrayel, a Coptic Christian lawyer who heads the Egyptian Union
for Human Rights, told AFP.

Guebrayel’s claim contradicts an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official
who said on Sunday that Attallah, who suffered from diabetes and
heart ailments, had likely died of natural causes.

Attallah was among five Evangelical Christian Egyptians detained in
Libya for allegedly attempting to seek religious converts in the
predominantly Muslim nation.

His death follows the March 1 detention of four dozen Egyptian
Christians in the city.

"Forty-eight Egyptian traders who worked in the Benghazi
municipal market have been arrested based on reports of suspect
activities," a Libyan security official told the agency in
Benghazi on condition of anonymity.

The source said the Copts were primarily arrested for entering
Libya illegally, they also had large quantities of religious texts
and paraphernalia which were not for “personal use.”

The men were reportedly rounded up by a group claiming allegiance
to be Ansar Sharia, the notorious Islamist militia implicated in
the death of American Ambassador Chris Stevens last September, the
UK Telegraph reports.

They were later handed over to a government-backed group in what
the daily reports is a “wider purge of hundreds of
Egyptians” in the restive city.

Ragaa Nagah, the wife of one of the detainees, told the paper her
husband “was afraid to tell us how he was tortured, but he
couldn't see out of one of his eyes.”

“They were standing over him and beating him while they asking
him to confess and when they were about to give him an electric
shock he said, 'Don't do that and I will say anything you want me
to say."

Four other foreigners - an Egyptian, a South African, a South
Korean and a Swede with a US passport - were also arrested in
Benghazi in mid-February on suspicion of proselytizing.

Proselytizing – which was banned under the secular regime of
Muammar Gaddafi – remains illegal in post-revolutionary Libya.

Guebrayel says that Egypt’s Islamist government had done little to
aid Egyptians arrested in Libya.

However, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry intervened to secure the release
of 55 Egyptians who were also arrested on suspicion of trying to
convert Muslims to Christianity. Thirty five of them were deported
for illegally entering the country, while 20 more were allowed to
stay in Libya.

Church officials say pre-revolutionary Libya had up to 100,000
Christians, though their numbers have dwindled to a few thousand
since.

Since the 2011 revolution that resulted in Gadhafi’s ouster and
subsequent death, the fear of Islamic extremism has rattled the
country’s small Christian minority, most of whom are
expatriates.